Jew World Order

The Iraqi army controls the southern sectors of Tal Afar, but the Hashd al-Shaabi, the Iran-backed, majority-Shiite militias, control the north, and the tension between the two was like a hum in the air. My driver was Kurdish and spoke little English, but when we approached the first checkpoint, he saw the flag of a Hashd militia and turned toward me with alarm.

“Me no Kurdi. You no Amriki,” he said. We were quiet at the roadblock, and they waved us through.

We reach Tal Afar in the heat of the afternoon. Our first stop is a walled compound that al-Hakim says could have been a mosque, where several ISIS-designed mortars lie in the entrance. They are deceptively simple on first blush, looking like standard American and Soviet mortars. But unlike those models, which come in a number of standard sizes (60 mm, 81 mm, 82 mm, 120 mm, and so on), these mortars are 119.5 mm, to match the inside diameter of the repurposed steel pipes that ISIS uses for launch tubes. This may sound like a small change, but mortars must fit perfectly in their launchers so that sufficient gas pressure can build for ejection. ISIS’ quality control tolerances are extremely tight, often down to a tenth of a millimeter.

Past the mortars, in the back of a building, stand a series of pressurized tanks connected with steel pipe and large drums of black liquid. On one tank, a spigot has dripped an ugly plume. “Would you say that’s corrosion?” Spleeters asks al-Hakim. It’s textbook toxic, the side of the tank a waterfall of bubbling metal in a V, like a drunk vomiting down the front of his shirt. But Spleeters has no way to take a sample, no testing kit, no hazmat suit or breathing mask.

“I feel my eyes a bit burning,” al-Hakim says. The whole area smells acrid, like paint, and bags of caustic soda, a decontaminate, lie nearby.

“There’s something fishy in here, man,” Spleeters agrees. We don’t stay much longer. The black sludge could have been a napalm-like incendiary tar or a toxic industrial chemical of some sort, but Spleeters couldn’t say conclusively what the tanks produced. (He would later learn that he might have been able to identify the industrial process if he’d taken better photos of the pressure dials and their serial numbers. No matter how much Spleeters documents in the field, he says, there is always the nagging suspicion that he’s forgotten something.)

After a short drive down the quiet, pock-marked streets, we arrive at a nondescript house that looks like the others on the block: stone wall, metal gate, individual rooms surrounding a central patio, shady and cool, breezy through spindly trees. Among the discarded shoes and bedding lie mortar tubes and artillery rounds. Spleeters moves them aside with casual familiarity.

At the back of the compound, Spleeters notices something unusual. A hole has been knocked in the concrete wall—as if by craftsmen, not bombs—and through the passage sits a large open room packed with tools and half-assembled ordnance. The area is shaded by tarps, out of sight of government drones, and the air smells of machine oil.

Spleeters knows where we are at once. This isn’t just a warehouse, like so many of the other places he’s photographed. This is a production facility.

On one table he sees some ISIS-designed bomblets, with injection-molded plastic bodies and small tail kits for stabilization in the air. These can be dropped from drones—the subject of many online videos—but they can also be thrown or shot from an AK-type rifle.

Nearby is a station for fuze production; piles of gleaming spiral shavings lie at the foot of an industrial lathe. The most common ISIS fuze looks like a silver conical plug with a safety pin stuck through the main body. There is an elegance to the minimalist, not simple, design, though the ingenuity of this device actually lies in its interchangeability. The standard ISIS fuze will trigger all of their rockets, mortars, and bomblets—a significant engineering problem solved. For the sake of security and reliability, the US and most other countries design specific fuzes for each type of ordnance. But the ISIS fuzes are modular, safe, and by some accounts have a relatively low dud rate.

Spleeters continues on to the back of the factory, which is where he first sees them: the reengineered rockets he’s been looking for, in nearly every stage of preparation and construction, along with assembly instructions written in marker on the walls. Dozens of the deconstructed warheads, awaiting modification, lie in a dark annex, and a long table with calipers and small tubs of homemade propellant stands nearby. Any individual workbench, on its own, would be a gold mine of intelligence that could illustrate ISIS’ weapons program. But the combination here is overwhelming, sensory overload. “Oh my God, look at this. And look at this. Oh my God, come here. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Spleeters mumbles, over and over, from station to station. Charlie had just stumbled into the chocolate factory.

But night is descending on Tal Afar, and a citywide electrical outage means Spleeters can’t examine or photograph this jackpot without natural light. Our convoy soon returns to the Iraqi army base near the city’s devastated airport. It’s a small post of salvaged single-wide trailers with holes in half the roofs; two detained fighters, thought to be ISIS—a young teenager and an older man, seemingly the only prisoners of the battle in Tal Afar—sleep in a trailer next to our quarters. Spleeters passes the evening impatiently, watching satellite television. In all the days we spent together, he seemed to do little more than work and eat, sleeping only a few hours at a time.

Dawn comes early, and when the soldiers are awake, Spleeters has the convoy return us to the workshop. He puts out 20 yellow crime-scene placards, one on each table, and then draws a map to help him reconstruct the room later. In one spot on the map, the welding rods. In another, a bench grinder. “It might not be a continuous process,” he says, thinking out loud. “It might be different stations for different things.”

Spleeters then begins to take photos, but by now the room is full of Iraqi intelligence officers curious about the workshop. They open every drawer, pick up every circuit board, kick scrap, remove papers, turn handles. Unfired ordnance is fairly safe, as long as you don’t drop it on its nose, but disassembled munitions are unpredictable, and the lab could have been booby-trapped besides. But Spleeters isn’t alarmed. He’s frustrated.

“Habibi,” he says, “I really need them to stop touching and taking stuff away. It’s important that it’s together, because it makes sense together. If they take it away, it doesn’t make sense anymore. Can you tell them?”

“I told them,” al-Hakim says.

“They can do whatever they want when I’m done,” he says wearily.

In a small room adjacent to the launcher workbenches, Spleeters begins examining dozens of rocket-propelled grenades of various models, some decades old and all of them bearing some identifying mark. Rockets manufactured in Bulgaria bear a “10” or “11” in a double circle. The green paints used by China and Russia are slightly different shades. “In Iraq, we have fought the whole world,” one soldier bragged to me a couple of days before, referring to the many foreign fighters recruited by ISIS. But he could easily have meant the arms from the disparate countries in that single room.

Spleeters carefully picks through the stacks of warheads until he finds what he’s been looking for: “I’ve got a PG-9 round, habibi,” Spleeters exclaims to al-Hakim. It is a Romanian rocket marked with lot number 12-14-451; Spleeters has spent the past year tracking this very serial number. In October 2014, Romania sold 9,252 rocket-propelled grenades, known as PG-9s, with lot number 12-14-451 to the US military. When it purchased the weapons, the US signed an end-use certificate, a document stating that the munitions would be used by US forces and not sold to anyone else. The Romanian government confirmed this sale by providing CAR with the end-user certificate and delivery verification document.

In 2016, however, Spleeters came across a video made by ISIS that showed a crate of PG-9s, with what appeared to be the lot number 12-14-451, captured from members of Jaysh Suriyah al-­Jadid, a Syrian militia. Somehow, PG-9s from this very same shipment made their way to Iraq, where ISIS technicians separated the stolen warheads from the original rocket motors before adding new features that made them better suited for urban combat. (Rocket-propelled grenades can’t be fired inside buildings, because of the dangerous back-blast. By attaching ballast to the rocket, ISIS engineers crafted a weapon that could be used in house-to-house fighting.)

So how exactly did American weapons end up with ISIS? Spleeters can’t yet say for sure. According to a July 19, 2017, report in The Washington Post, the US government secretly trained and armed Syrian rebels from 2013 until mid-2017, at which point the Trump administration discontinued the program—in part over fears that US weapons were ending up in the wrong hands. The US government did not reply to multiple requests for comment on how these weapons wound up in the hands of Syrian rebels or in an ISIS munitions factory. The government also declined to comment on whether the US violated the terms of its end-user certificate and, by extension, failed to comply with the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, of which it is one of 130 signatories.